JON CARROLL

Well, that was a fascinating picture on the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday. The photographer was clearly standing at the front of a commuter train car and shooting down the long row of seats to the back of the car. At the back, one person can be seen standing. In every row, the aisle and window seats are taken and the middle seat is left vacant.

It turns out that this is an official trend; commuters on the Eastern seaboard (and maybe, for all I know, all over the country) are reluctant to sit in the middle seats -- even though, on some rail lines, the middle seats are wider than the aisle and window seats.

Indeed, the problem is so pervasive that some lines are reconfiguring their cars so that each row on each side of the aisle has only two seats. (Such a great advertising slogan: Acme Rail, Now With Fewer Seats for Your Convenience.) Others are spending large sums of money for double-decker trains that have more seats, none of them in the nasty middle. The Times estimates that the double-deckers cost $600,000 more per car than single-decker three- seat models.

You'd think, what with public transit in such grave financial trouble, the railroad might have tried a public relations campaign first: "Really, they won't bite: Take a middle seat" or "We'll raise fares unless you take that middle seat." OK, that seems a little hostile.

So I am trying to figure out the middle-seat thing. I could glibly say, "Fear of intimacy/strangers/crime/smelliness," but I have ridden the New York subways at rush hours, where I have had some uncomfortably intimate relationships with sundry humans, and no one has so much as blinked an eye. We all stared at the ads, or out the window at the rolling blackness, while the bumping and the swaying created unseemly frictions. And yet, every rush hour, same old thing. So there is some context involved.

Is it a class thing? I don't think so. I have ridden the Hudson River Line, which goes to some pretty tony places, but it also goes to Yonkers, and the getting-off-work waiters and maintenance workers have the same middle-seat issues as the executive secretaries and the HR managers.

On airplanes it's a different deal because people are assigned middle seats, and they are not allowed to stand during the flight, so they take the middle seat. They grimace, they look around frantically to see if some window or aisle has gone unclaimed when the door of the plane finally closes, they smile thin smiles and adopt the unfocused stare of the political prisoner.

Unless they're drinkers, of course, in which case ... well, you've been there. "Stewardess, could I have three more of those bottles so I don't have to bother you later?" Oh, this is going to be big fun 30,000 feet above Kansas City.

I once made a proposal that armrests in planes should have a red line on them, indicating the acceptable elbow areas for each person. Middle-seat people often think that, because of their bad luck and general wretchedness, they are entitled to every inch of both armrests. And, in my experience, few people confront the issue directly and engage in a calm and candid discussion of elbowroom. No, it's usually guerrilla warfare the whole way to the destination -- a shove, a nudge, a stretch, sometimes a muttered apology. It's exhausting, is what it is.

Do people feel trapped in the middle seat? Do people have an image of some scene in a gangster movie, where a person innocently slides into the front seat of an automobile and all of a sudden finds he's squeezed between two thugs while a third guy behind wields an ice pick? Is there a lot of ice pick fantasizing going on during commutes?

When I commute on BART, which is not often, I do fantasize, but never about ice picks. What is it about strangers on public transportation that makes them so sexy? It's the same with waitresses and nurses -- they get an added five points on the Beaufort scale. Or ... say, am I out on a limb here? Maybe we should just forget this whole paragraph.

Could we find a way to stop transit companies from paying millions of extra dollars because we fear the middle seat? Something like Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket in every millionth middle seat? A fruit basket? Intravenous caffeine injections? A hearty handshake from the conductor, assuming there is a conductor and you want to shake his hand?

If we could rid ourselves of mesokathizophobia (a word I just made up; please feel free to use, improve, or discard), we could free millions of dollars for, say, restrooms and escalators at BART stations. Or, for our East Coast brothers and sisters, a special spray that rids train stations of that odd cabbage odor. Let's all work on it.

OK, you sit here and you sit over there and you, well, there's only one seat left and, what, leaving so soon, you just got here, how about a cheese puff?